


Ghost of a Chance

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Fluff, Halloween(esque)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-10-26 12:11:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20742005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Tifa shares drinks with the Turks in what is perhaps not the world's classiest horror-themed hotel bar.





	Ghost of a Chance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meilan_Firaga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/gifts).

Leaving Edge had driven home just how much the world had changed, and it made the ways in which she had changed with it all the more apparent. The continuity of everyday life, where things are slow and halting and happen bit by bit, had left Tifa half-feeling as though she was just in some other Midgar this whole time, as though she might someday look out the bar's window and see the dim amber lights of the 3 AM train gliding into the Sector 7 station. In those fuzzed moments before the final call, what was really different? The outside landscape was altered, the world was saved, but there she was--still playing den mother to a crew of lost souls while she waited expectantly for some sign or signal from a man who wouldn't provide them.

Outside though, where she could see at a distance the wreckage of the old city, things took on new perspective. Crossing one continent to another, she'd marveled to see villages revivified in a wilderness flush with new animal life and increasingly free of monsters. People trickled out of Midgar to rebuild out on the plains and by the sea. Junon grew skyward as the last of its military trappings were dismantled. She thought, as she stood at the docks waiting passage, that she'd seen the shadow of something skirting the edge of the distant coast, as though the body of some vast bird was circling, at play in the sea breeze.

Everywhere she went, life was moving forward in all the ways she had long wished her own would, and it seemed almost a bit perverse to make long pilgrimage back West in light of it. She didn't know quite what she wanted from this journey. Getting away from Cloud for a span wasn't guaranteed to get her over him. Still, the change of pace and change of scenery had done her good thus far, and if some hokey meditation on past journeys was the excuse that justified it, so it went.

She tumbled down onto a bed done up to resemble an iron maiden and smirked quietly that she should be doing so much morose philosophizing in the middle of the Gold Saucer's absurd hotel. Somewhere above her the LED eyes of a tormented spirit flashed as it whirled about the ceiling. As the distant roar of trams and applause sounded outside, she told herself she could think about her outlook on life and its present trajectory some other day. If she was going to ditch the kids and her never-quite-enough-to-be-an-ex for enough time to sweep through the planet's most magnificently gaudy entertainment center, she ought find something with which to entertain herself.

She unpacked, freshened up in a large skull-shaped sink, and walked downstairs to the bar that had replaced the little giftshop she'd visited prior to Meteorfall. It was one of the few alterations she'd seen in recent days that had done little to impress her, but she'd been on the road all day and figured a drink would put her more in the mood to spend her evening maneuvering an imaginary snowboard. As she stepped through a curtain of plastic spiders, she stopped in surprise. At the long oak bar sat two members of the ShinRa corporation's former Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department, evidently very caught up in their investigation of the gimmicky house cocktail.

"Yooooh!" Reno chirped before anyone could politely attempt to avoid one another. "Fancy meeting you here, Lockhart!" He slapped the bench next to him in what was presumably an invitation to join them. Rude said nothing, remaining as near to motionless as he could. The straw through which he was drinking some admixture of curacao and dry ice fell from his lips.

She smiled and walked over to sit next to them, eliciting a look of surprise from Reno and continued silence from his companion. A barkeeper done up like a zombie approached her with an affected shamble, and she ordered a beer.

"Business trip?" she asked bemusedly.

"Nah," Reno replied, obviously a little tipsy. "Nothing like that. We had some vacation time racked up, and I got a hot tip on a bird."

Her beer arrived. She caught the cap between two metal ridges on the wrist of her glove and flicked it off in fluid motion, smiling as she caught it on its way down.

"Vacation time?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "I didn't think ShinRa could afford to be all that generous with benefits these days..."

Reno gestured dramatically about the room, grinning. "And yet here we are... on vacation."

Tifa raised her bottle. "Here's to that, then."

The whole situation was strange, sharing drinks with old enemies. It was the sort of unreality she had completely gotten used to while never quite knowing how to address it. With Reno in particular, there was always that question as to whether she ought to say something cutting, to demand a reckoning, to start a fight. Now as with every other time, she did none of those things. After the threat of complete planetary collapse hits you once or twice, after monstrosities rise from the sea and the sky quite literally starts to fall, encounters like this began to feel pretty natural.

"So..." Reno continued. "How's the whatever-he-is and the kids? They around here."

She breathed deeply before taking a long drink. "They're all back in Edge. Cloud isn't a whatever-he-is either."

"Oh? What is he then?"

She considered starting a fight again.

"He's a friend--a good friend."

Reno gave a low whistle and elbowed his compatriot. She noticed for the first time that Rude had neither spoken nor moved since she'd walked in. Her thoughts drifted to years past, recalling an awkward night at Gongaga where Yuffie had teased her about something she'd allegedly overheard before some of their company had gotten into a scuffle with ShinRa’s finest. She hadn’t taken it seriously at the time. She’d made it a policy to never take anything Yuffie said seriously by that point, unless it concerned her earnest and undisguised designs on their materia or money.

"Not aiming to be anything more then?” Reno continued nonchalantly, sipping his drink.

Tifa looked at Rude a moment, trying without success to parse his expression. The shades made it difficult, and the unsteady flickering of so many wiggling nylon torches didn’t help. She took another drink.

“I know when to stop aiming.”

“Oh…” Reno nodded with a sagacity she suspected to be fueled by prior cocktails. “So, just asking for a friend, but are you in the market for a new whatever-he-is then?”

Rude turned to him and shot a glare obvious enough that it seemed to burn through his sunglasses.

“You’re not my type,” she replied flatly.

“Ouch!” He clutched his heart melodramatically, and collapsed onto the bar. The zombie, who had been cleaning a back counter, paused a moment to look and then turned back immediately to what he was doing. Reno lifted his head to address her.

“Naw, seriously, crushed as I am… I _was_ asking for a friend, yo.”

Rude stood up, moving Reno rather firmly from off the bar as he did so. Even in the artificial balefire surrounding him, Tifa got the impression that his features were a touch redder than they had been before.

“Why don’t we just go back to our room, man? You’re getting a little silly.”

“Eh,” he grinned, “You’re right. You’re right. I’m bringin’ down the mood. Ritzy establishment like this?” He swung an arm, nearly hitting a shrunken head as he did so. “I need to crawl back into one of those sarcophag…sarcophagi…sarcophapodes? Whatever it is that they set us up with upstairs, _I_ should crawl into one.”

He clapped Rude on the back. “You though, Rude, I don’t think you’re nearly silly enough for such a fate. You should work on that.”

Rude looked as if he wanted to say something, but he did not.

“Sorry if I offended anyone with my lack of decorum,” Reno said with a salute, turning from the bar and walking briskly towards the hotel lobby. Rude, quite evidently flustered now, paused, seemingly unsure as to whether or not he was going to follow him. He turned towards Tifa and looked at her with obvious unease.

“Have a… have a good evening,” he eventually blurted out before dashing after his partner. Tifa laughed as the wall of spiders tangled themselves in his wake. She finished her beer, and thought about the frank ridiculousness of having finally extinguished the torch she’d been carrying to find that there was every possibility that somebody was still holding one up for her. It was... different.

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, and she wondered if she was, perhaps, reading the situation entirely wrong. She was about to pay out when Rude abruptly returned.

“So…” He took a deep breath. “I’ve apparently been locked out of my room.” 

She worked hard to suppress a giggle, doing her best to nod sympathetically.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Have you checked with the front desk? I imagine that…”

“Can I buy you a drink?” he blurted out very suddenly, cutting her off.

She paused, looked at him, and felt herself melt into a warm grin.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

There were a lot of factors at play she supposed: her prior meditations on a world rebuilt, her discarded hopes for the man she’d left behind, the softening inhibitions a single beer already afforded her, and the strange and surreal feeling one got from any fateful encounter set in the midst of this neon horrorshow. She only had a few seconds to wonder what she would have said under other circumstances. Rude sat beside her and gave her a look as if he’d just stumbled off the end of the world.

“I’m really truly sorry…” he began in a halting voice. “He’s just… he’s like that.”

She nodded, looked at the blacklit drink board and ordered whatever the “Dorky Face” was, cracking a laugh when some dark yellow, anise-garnished monstrosity arrived in a novelty Jack-o-Lantern mug.

“So…” she began, taking a sip, “Are you just going to watch me drink this until Reno let’s you back in, or are we going to talk?”

“Look… Reno has a lot of ideas.”

She took another sip, raising her eyebrows. It tasted like somebody had chucked a pie slice into a bottle of vodka.

“Such as?"

“I mean…” He scratched the back of his head very nervously. “You and Cloud…”

“As I said, just a friend.”

“So, if I was… if somebody was…? I mean, given where we are, would it be okay if?”

“You’re a lot different once somebody ropes you into a conversation, you know?” Her voice was soft, and the canned music that they continually piped in here seemed suddenly more stirring than it had any right to be.

“I’m sorry,” Rude said. “I’m not much of a talker.” He seemed to brace himself for a moment. “What I wanted to say was…”

“Are you asking me on a date, Rude?” she asked bluntly.

He seemed to turn a million different shades of crimson as mouth curled into a stupefied smile.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“Sounds good to me,” she took another sip, and doing her best to suppress any deep personal ruminations as to what the hell she was doing, followed it up with “You’re too cute a Turk to spend the evening in a coffin.”

His expression was the sort of thing that all the best and worst poets try to capture, although she thought later that it was rather succinctly summarized by the name of the drink that was then on her tongue. Grinning like a schoolgirl, she plucked off his sunglasses to get a better view of him.

He seemed taken aback by the action, but kept smiling with a dumbfounded excitement as her eyes met his. They were the same mundane dishwater brown as her own, and for all they might lack the distinction of a Mako glow, she thought they had their own sparkle independent of the million garish lights that surrounded them.

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.


End file.
